Interviews// Firaxis on XCOM: Enemy Unknown

SPOnG: How much did you guys deliberate on having fog of war in the game? Because in modern turn-based games it seems almost like a faux-pas to include it.

Pete Murray: It’s important, I think, for a couple of reasons. For gameplay reasons, it gives you a lot to work with, and you can have unrevealed/revealed-but-not-seen/seen, and that’s key. Just because you pass through a building doesn’t give you perfect knowledge of what’s going on inside, right? We can also come up with cool stuff for it too. There’s a grenade called the Battle Scanner, which you throw out and gives you line-of-sight briefly. You can chuck it round a corner, you can lay it down and monitor and area to make sure nobody flanks you, and things like that. Yes, we did need fog of war.


SPOnG: You guys must have been mindful that you should stay as true to the original XCOM game as possible. But at the same time there’s the need to introduce new things too. How did you go about balancing that, so you have a perfect harmony of nostalgia and fresh gameplay?

Pete Murray: That’s a great question. Jake (Solomon, lead designer at Firaxis) started out - and I should give all the credit to Jake for this - with a prototype that was very close to the original XCOM itself. And in the course of iterating on that design, he got some fresh ideas and he tried them out.

Some concepts from the original game worked really nicely and moved forward well. But with some others, we realised that there were different ways we could create the same impact. We can create the same kind of experience, make people feel like they’re making cool decisions, with different systems. That leads to things like the move-and-action system versus Time Credits. That worked really well, and eventually enough of these new systems came together that Jake was at the core of something that was really solid.

This is good. It gives you all the tension that you get from the original XCOM game - I’m going to generate a plan, gonna run into the enemy, the plan will change, I will change and we will emerge victorious - you get all that but it now moves a lot more naturally. I think that was a cool moment for all of us. When you’re playing it and you realise, ‘this is not what the original was, but it still feels like it does and it’s cool.’

There have been some... well, the interesting thing is you find a lot of things that don’t work too.


SPOnG: What are some examples of that, then? Go on, you can tell us one.

Pete Murray: Ahhh... [thinks] There were some interface things that Jake tried out, which were a good idea in concept, and it was interesting information to have, but it turns out that there’s no good way to present it on the screen. In the end, it doesn’t add anything. It was information the player didn’t really need. To give you a visual idea, they looked like barber poles, extending from troops to targets they could see, and vice versa. When things start to look like barber poles, you have to have a rethink.


SPOnG: What inspired the remake?

Pete Murray: The original is Jake’s favourite game. That’s the game that made him want to be a computer scientist. I think that some people are born to make games - Jake was born to re-imagine XCOM. He loves it to pieces. He will go toe-to-toe... I played a lot of XCOM back in the day and I thought I was pretty good, but he gave me a lecture about why you don’t outfit Fusion Ball Launchers on your Interceptors, and the necessity of establishing a Laser Cannon economy early on. I was in the presence of a true master [laughs]! When your lead designer has such joy for a game, it’s fun for everybody.


SPOnG: Have you looked into any of the sequels, such as Apocalypse, for inspiration in this re-imagination?

Pete Murray: You can certainly see a progression from Enemy Unknown through Apocalypse. I think Jake really wanted to go back and do a re-imagining of the basic game though, generally. Apocalypse is a pretty linear descendant of the original XCOM. That’s all well and good - I think Apocalypse is a great game, it’s a lot of people’s favourite XCOM game - but we wanted to go more towards the direction of the original.


SPOnG: Is your game better with Kinect?

Pete Murray: Everything’s better with Kinect! [laughs] There are some interface systems that are exciting and novel and can be used in interesting ways. I’m not entirely sure XCOM is the ideal venue for Kinect.


SPOnG: Would you like to see an RTS game built with Kinect functionality?

Pete Murray: It’d be kind of cool. I mean, I guess I can sit here and think of ways to do that. But a game pad works pretty well too. Keyboard and mouse are still perfectly acceptable. We joked about hacking in Kinect controls in Civ V just to see if we could do it. I don’t think that idea got very far though.


SPOnG: There’s something to be said about strategy games in general, because the second you say it’s a multi-format title, immediately PC players are put off. What do you think about that, as a developer?

Pete Murray: I understand where the PC players are coming from. 99 per cent of my gaming is on PC. It’s a little harder on international flights, so I crack out my Game Boy. But these guys don’t need to worry. The game is still good, and it’s good regardless of what platform you’re playing it on. We’re going to be able to do things with PC interface that you’re not going to see on consoles, because PC spec is a little more open, you have a whole keyboard that you can work with. But I don’t think the PC players meed to worry. I hear you. I hear your concerns.


SPOnG: It’s not a concern so much as I can already imagine forums around the internet saying the PC platform’s been left out or something.

Pete Murray: One of the really cool things is that there is a lot of that going on right after the game’s announcement. A lot of people saying, “Oh my God” and freaking out. It went away pretty fast, because they realised that it still looks like a fun game. Fun games are fun games, no matter what platform you play them on. We love them all.


SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.

Pete Murray: Thank you!


XCOM will be landing on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 later this year.